From droughts and water scarcity to sea level rise and floods, the impacts of climate change on our water resources are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. Enter “Cli-Fi” – a burgeoning literary genre that grapples with the effects of our changing climate and envisions a future if we fail to act. The stories featured in this discussion underscore society’s changing relationship with water and convey the impacts of climate change in a way that scientific facts and numbers alone cannot.

The event will feature Claire Vaye Watkins, author of the critically acclaimed Gold Fame Citrus and Battleborn; Abby Geni, Chicago-based author of The Lightkeepers, The Last Animal and “World After Water;” and Shannon Heffernan, reporter and producer at WBEZ. Rob Moore, expert on climate change and water policy at NRDC, will moderate the discussion. The event is being held in coordination with Luftwerk’s dynamic art installation solarise: a sea of all colors and is part of a series of events that uses art as a means to highlight critical environmental issues.

7:30pm – 8:00pm: Book sales and book signing with authors facilitated by Women & Children First

About the Panelists:

Abby Geni is the author of The Lightkeepers, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Spring 2016 selection, and The Last Animal (2013), a finalist for the Orion Book Award and a winner of the Friends of American Writers Literary Award. Her stories have received first place in the Glimmer Train Fiction Open and the Chautauqua Contest, and her work has appeared in Glimmer Train, The Indiana Review, New Stories from the Midwest, Confrontation, and The Crab Orchard Review, among other literary journals and anthologies. Geni is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a recipient of the Iowa Fellowship. She lives in Chicago.

Shannon Heffernan is a reporter and producer for WBEZ’s Front & Center. Her work has been featured on both local and national programs including NPR and Morning Edition. Shannon’s reporting has garnered awards from the Chicago Headline Club and Illinois Associated Press, as well as a regional Murrow Award. She produced the WBEZ Series “After Water,” a project edited by Cate Cahan that invited writers to peer into the future—100 years or more—and imagine the region around the Great Lakes when water scarcity is a dominant social issue. Prior to becoming a reporter at WBEZ, Shannon Heffernan received a Soros Media Fellowship.

Claire Vaye Watkins is the author of Gold Fame Citrus and Battleborn, which won the Story Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. A Guggenheim Fellow, Claire is on the faculty of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. She is also the co-director, with Derek Palacio, of the Mojave School, a free creative writing workshop for teenagers in rural Nevada.